We are almost there...

The plans are almost finished, hotels booked, online tickets bought, etc. etc. I'm still waiting on information for 1 last thing for the final week of our trip (I'll give no hints yet as to what it is, I still have a few posts to catch up...) Everyone is very excited! We leave this Friday morning to go to the Rock-N-Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Saturday we start the geocaching with the event I mentioned earlier. I think we have our friends, the Hobbes, talked into going with us for the Rock-N-Roll Hall of Fame and they might stay the night in a hotel and go to the event!

I've been frantically reading reviews and information about different sites to go to. I've also been watching the travel bugs we sent out to meet us on the trip. I think 2 of them are getting very close to Philly and Boston. We also plan on placing several travel bugs with our patches along the way, so I still need to get these set up. One good thing about this, however, is that my wife's phone can act as a mobile hotspot for the Internet... with our laptop, we should be able to activate the bugs along the way... I can also do it through my phone. We paid for the $10 Geocaching.com's application for the phone, and I must say, I really like it... it's not nearly as accurate as the Garmin 550t GPS with any kind of tree cover, but for those urban finds and automatic searches and logging, I love it. I think the easiest way to sort out which geocaches we will do, I'll just do a quick search via the iPhone and/or the laptop, using the mobile hotspot, when we get to a place we feel like doing a little geocaching. The plan is to do a minimum of 1 per day and 1 per state... we may even have to take slight detours to New Hampshire, Delaware, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island just to get those states in.

Currently, Ruth is in Chicago at a convention and will get back tomorrow evening. Ellen is still working on her online PE class (strange as that sounds, it's actually a pretty good class), reading about Ghengis Khan for her AP World History class starting in the Fall, and recovering from an Upper Respitory Infection... ugh, what a way to start our trip. I think, however, she'll be feeling better by friday when we leave. Ethan is busy playing video games... yeah, rough life... he did mow the lawn yesterday and cleaned his room, but still, it must be nice to be 12, I don't remember it's been so long ago ;-).

Now for what you've all been waiting for... our next destination:

Washington D.C.

After Philadelphia we will be heading to Washington D.C.!!! Where we will spend the next 4 days. Obviously those 4 days will be jammed pack with a ton of activities. We could probably spend all 4 days at the Smithsonians and the whole mall area, but we also plan on doing Mt. Vernon, the Spy Museum, the Newseum, Holocaust Museum, National Museum of Crime & Punishment, and finally taking a day trip to Baltimore to see some historic ships and Fort McHenry! Whew... the only thing I regret, so far, is that we will spend only 4 days here... who knows, we may make some changes and take a day off of the Philadelphia time (5 days) and add a day to D.C. Regardless, I'm sure we will have a ton of fun!

That's all for now. I'm going to blog one more time before we leave on Friday, but then I plan on blogging each day until we finish the trip! The blogs may or may not be as long as they have in the past, but I'm making up for it with the frequency.